"This new biography of the legendary mistress of King Louis XV of France offers a dramatic insight into the life of one of the most enchanting, powerful, and feared women to grace the world's stage.". "Christine Pevitt Algrant presents a new biography of the most famous of Louis XV's mistresses. From her modest beginnings in early eighteenth-century Paris, to her reign as the undisputed mistress of Versailles, Madame de Pompadour traces the life of a truly remarkable, self-made woman whose astonishing rise confounded the most experienced and the most sophisticated of her contemporaries."--BOOK JACKET.